The Public Arts by Gilbert Seldes

Author:Gilbert Seldes [Seldes, Gilbert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Literary Criticism, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781560007487
Google: m72vngEACAAJ
Publisher: Transaction
Published: 1994-01-15T05:28:36+00:00

15 THE GOOD-BAD BERLE

DOI: 10.4324/9780429339325-15

The careers of this man are various—not always distinguished, but invariably instructive. Thoroughly unlikable in his beginnings and intolerable in his triumph, he “got wise to himself” when things went wrong for him, and showed something approaching grace after returning to popular favor—and then he was tripped up by the man who exploited all his least attractive manners. Nothing, in short, has been more becoming to Milton Berle than adversity.

Considering what Berle was in his early vaudeville and night-club days, the mind shrinks away from the thought of him as a child actor. The Palace Theatre was within a few years of its end when Berle came to manhood and, as a young, brash, impudent snapper-up of other people’s trifles, exploited his own lack of originality, telling his rivals’ jokes louder than they did, willing to do anything for a laugh, and apparently committed to the technique of contagion because he always laughed first—and loudest—himself. Perhaps his show of delight in his own talents was compensation for knowing that they were of a low order, but there is no doubt that his push and self-assurance were positive factors in his early success. It was a time when few people had much confidence in anything, least of all in the aggressive drive of the American system that had ended in an economic depression and an emotional wallow of self-pity and despair. Berle was always in there pitching.

He worked in night clubs, and he appeared at those peculiar social gatherings given by charitable institutions at fifty dollars per person (deductible) for the most noble of purposes and for men only. Few performers could resist the pressure to play these stag parties, and fewer, I should guess, enjoyed them more than Berle. For years his style had all the stigmata of these occasions: the loud voice that had to make itself heard above the talk and laughter of men who had eaten rich food and drunk copiously and were free of their inhibiting women; the big leer that could be seen through the smoke of hundreds of cigars; the broad gestures that had to carry to the ends of a room intended for dining, illshaped for concentrating attention. And these physical qualities run parallel to certain psychological ones, one of the most urgent of which is to demonstrate that the entertainer is aware of what the audience wants and is going to provide it—plus just a little more smut than they expect. He does not have to ingratiate himself because his audience is captive; and a single standard prevails: how much dirt? The aesthetes in the company may want to know how dirty the dirt is; the general view is that quantity alone will do the trick. Obviously this has an effect on the style of the entertainer, and this is all I am now trying to isolate from the complex and fascinating subject of the smutty story (the dirty joke, the filthy comic picture, pornographic literature, and the like).

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